She turned to see Malmagden drawing something on the wall behind her. It glowed faintly in the darkness even as he finished it.
“This is where we part company,” he apologized. “The Angle Web works one at a time, or else I would take you along with me.” He laughed at an old memory. “You should have seen some of the horrendous accidents when we tried to use it as a troop transport—arms poking out of each other, heads poking out of stomachs.” He waved his hands, What a mess. “You will be all right,” he promised. “You are a pretty American. The Soviets will present you like a birthday present to your General Eisenhower.”
“Where are you going?”
She had some idea of tracking him down. Malmagden saw the burning in her eyes. He would have smiled if he could have. He looked away instead.
“There is a little beer hall, not quite here and not quite there, you know? The maidens are pretty and sympathetic. They sing a sad song to make one weep. The beer is good, like wine. Maybe we will meet there sometime, yes?”
“Count on it,” she promised him.
Malmagden looked away at the line of smoke from a nearby rocket impact. He seemed suddenly unable to leave. “Do you know what my philosophers taught me about moral ambiguity? Moral ambiguity is the opiate of the starving class. Auf wiedersehen, Fräulein Berne.”
* * *
As for Susan Gilbert, she was found by a brigade of Soviet construction engineers. She had been stuck on the surface of Berlin for two days while the city collapsed around her. She had seen more people die—lots more.
She was dehydrated and delirious, babbling in American English crazy stories about drowning German children to keep them from being eaten by the living dead.
In her own mind, she was simply doing the right thing. Malmagden would not blackmail her into silence, no matter what happened to her as a result of her confession. Of course, she may not have thought how this sounded to her various confessors.
A Russian captain listened to her story in a field hospital. He smiled in amazed good humor and decided his American counterpart had to hear this. The two of them sat quiet as she described how she had helped drown hundreds of Germans to keep the undead from reaching the surface world.
They shook their heads at each other. The American, a captain named Turknell, mouthed the word, “Shock?” with a raised eyebrow for a question mark.
The Russian whispered, “Gestapo!” and made a dreadful face.
“Gestapo, no. You don’t understand.” She held up Schoenberg’s crumpled cigarette pack. “They were nice,” she said.
“She’s just a bit cross-eyed,” noted Turknell. “Did they do that to her as well?”
The Russian shrugged. The Gestapo were animals, certainly.
Captain Turknell patted her arm: poor dear.
“When you get better, maybe we can talk about your interrogation, you know, a bit more in-depth.”
Delirious or not, she marked something entirely too sweaty about Captain Turknell. He had this sort of lurid sympathy that made her bunch up her collar anytime he looked her way.
She didn’t talk to him again. Eventually, she told most of her story to Walter Foley. She even mentioned her complicity in the flooding of the sewers—let him bring charges, she thought. Berlin had been his idea in the first place.
She never told Foley about Alexander Schoenberg or the two Volksstürm kids. Their memories were a private affair, just between herself and the man who had murdered them.
Until they met again, that’s how she wanted to keep it.
Chapter Three
CHARLEY SHRIEVE FOUND HER OUT IN THE ALLEY behind the warehouse. She was leaning against the hood of the Plymouth, taking in the stimulating mix of brine and diesel exhaust from the docks a few blocks to the west.
“Walter Foley sent me out here to collect you,” he said. “He thinks our visitor’s going to come back and catch you here all unaware.”
“What do you think?” She took another cigarette from him.
“Me? I think you’re waiting for it.”
Susan smiled. This Charley Shrieve knew his agents.
“You got some kind of special grudge against this character? You should see yourself. You look like the cruise director for the USS Arizona.”
“Don’t mind me. This stuff just brings back old times.”
Dale Bogen appeared out of the shadows. Walter Foley jogged after him, huffing out directions to the Agnes Dei Catholic Hospital, where Carl Leder was being held in a private mental ward under twenty-four-hour military guard. Leder was going to look at the note on Hartmann’s napkin.
Bogen slid in behind the wheel of the Plymouth. “Mount up, Boys!” he cried as he cranked the ignition. “Let’s ride!”